Why Isn't a Woman Directing My Brilliant Friend?

Last summer, you couldn't step into a New York City subway car without spotting one of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels. The books' "bad" covers belied a story unlike any other told in modern fiction, and it seemed every New York woman was sprinting to catch up on the four-part series, which ended with the publication of The Story of the Lost Child in 2015. Chronicling the complicated 50-year friendship of Elena (Lenù) Greco and Raffaella (Lila) Cerullo, the books tackle the reality of platonic relationships between women with brutal, beautiful honesty. Clearly, Ferrante's stories struck a chord; according to Europa Editions, the four books have sold a combined 2.5 million copies in North America since the English translation of My Brilliant Friend, the series' first installment, debuted on September 25, 2012.

In the wake of such success, chatter naturally turns to adaptation possibilities, and last Thursday, HBO announced a partnership with Italian broadcaster Rai for an eight-part, Italian-language adaptation of My Brilliant Friend, which is scheduled to begin filming this summer. This is amazing news—we need women-centric storylines onscreen now more than ever, and the production's commitment to authenticity, from the Italian-language dialogue to filming in Naples, is admirable—except for one thing. All eight episodes will be directed by a man.

"As a man, it's almost impossible for director Saverio Costanzo to identify with Lenù and Lila's struggles."

The glaring lack of opportunities for women directors has been a hot-button topic in the industry since earlier this year, when back-to-back studies revealed an unsurprising truth: women are not getting directing jobs. First, a report out of the San Diego State Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film found that just seven percent of the biggest movies of 2016 were directed by women. Then, a USC study reported that just four percent of the highest-grossing films of the past decade (2006-2016) were directed by women. That translates to just 35 women directing 45 films over 10 years. Only six of those women were non-white.

While these findings generated conversation, they've spurred no action. In fact, just days after USC published its report, an unnamed source told Deadline that major production companies refuse todiscuss (for "legal reasons") a proposal from the Directors Guild of America that requires producers to interview women and minority directors for jobs. Meanwhile, research conducted by The Wrap shows that women will only direct eight percent of movies slated for release between 2017 and 2019 by the six major "legacy" studios: Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros., with Disney and Fox not releasing any movies directed by women in 2017. In a prime example of a missed opportunity, Warner Bros. announced last week that it's negotiating for Joss Whedon to direct, write and produce a highly anticipated Batgirl adaptation. But this clearly conscious decision to refusewomen directing jobs isn't helping the movie business, which continues tofret over declining box office numbers.

Saverio Costanzo, who will direct all eight episodes of My Brilliant Friend for HBO

Getty Images

That leaves us in a "golden age of television," where traditional dramas, subversive comedies and limited series starring marquee names outpace the box office, where blockbusters like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead dominate the pop culture conversation year-round and prestige projects and popular adaptations opt to call the small screen—which provides more time to tell a fully realized story—home. Which leads us to the wildly popular Neapolitan novels and their highly-anticipated on-screen adaptations. More than 450 scripted shows aired in 2016, but men directed a whopping 83 percent of them during the 2015-16 season, according to a Directors Guild of America report published in September. The My Brilliant Friend production could have been a massive opportunity to usher one or more women directors into the international spotlight, but instead, HBO and Rai hired Saverio Costanzo, an Italian director with four feature films and a TV show under his belt. Sure, he's qualified, but his very first statement about the project proves he doesn't understand the source material: "They are characters that each one of us can inhabit no matter what country you are from," he said. "They are so well told, in such detail, that we can all identify with them and their desire to emancipate themselves… Elena Ferrante has managed to tell in the first person things that are very intimate, risky, that we all feel but that you need plenty of courage to admit."

We can all identify with them and their desire to emancipate themselves. As a man, it's almost impossible for Costanzo to identify with Lenù and Lila's struggles. Their story is distinctly female; they had very different experiences from the men they grew up with, something Lenù herself states repeatedly throughout the series. From Lila's family forbidding her from attending school to her husband and his employers stealing the business she conceived out of her hands, the politics of gender oppression are inextricably woven into her story, and placing a man in charge of the telling of that story undermines its very message.

Chronicling the complicated 50-year friendship of Lenù and Lila, the books tackle the reality of platonic relationships between women with brutal, beautiful honesty.

Europa Editions

The Neapolitan novels address painful topics that overwhelmingly affect women, like domestic violence and rape, with unflinching honesty; in one particularly harrowing scene in the second book, The Story of a New Name, Lila is raped by her own husband on her wedding night. Given that women are affected by sexual violence at higher rates than men (one in five women and one in 71 men will be raped at some point in their lives, according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center), it only makes sense that women should be charged with depicting such incidents onscreen. Yet television's recent history is bloated with gratuitous rape sequences written and directed by men. Game of Thrones, arguably the most popular series on TV right now, came under fire for depicting what was labeled an unnecessary rape through the eyes of a victim's foster brother, in an episode manned by frequent GoT director Jeremy Podeswa. "Her sobs become the score for someone else's story," writes Sonia Saraiya atSalon. "The episode loses sight, literally, of who she is."

The solution, of course, is not very surprising: as Maureen Ryan argues for Variety, establishing an environment behind the camera where women can speak openly—and have their opinions taken seriously—can avoid rape-as-cheap-plot-point and convey sexual assaults integral to a show's story line in a sensitive, meaningful way. This can range from greenlighting projects created and overseen by women (like Shonda Rhimes's Grey's Anatomy and Scandal, Jenji Kohan's Orange is the New Black and Melissa Rosenberg's Jessica Jones) to hiring an even ratio of men and women as directors and writers.

Several influential members of the industry have taken steps toward change; in 2016, Ryan Murphy, the mastermind behind the likes of American Horror Story, American Crime Story, Scream Queens and Feud, launched the Half foundation, which promises to employ women, people of color and members of the LGBTQ community for 50 percent of the directing positions on his shows. For her TV show Queen Sugar, Ava Duvernay hired women directors for all 13 episodes of its first season, but warned Hollywood that she can't be its only beacon of diversity: "I'm one person," she toldThe Hollywood Reporter. "That's not change. That's an anomaly." The adaptation of My Brilliant Friend will be written by a team of two men and two women—Costanzo, Francesco Piccolo, Laura Paolucci and Ferrante herself—so statistically speaking, women will have a chance to influence the content of the series. But at the end of the day, Costanzo is behind the camera and will have the final say over how a scene is conveyed.

Of course, talking heads for the industry are fullof excuses for why they don't hire women. In Ariane Lange's Buzzfeedinvestigation into the "lost generation" of women directors, Jeanne Mau, vice president of CBS's Diversity Initiative, said producers won't hire directors without recent work history. This model, Lange writes, overwhelmingly works against women, who already have a hard time getting work because ofunconscious bias, and who are statistically more likely to take time off to tend to their families.Rachel Feldman, a TV director who couldn't get work after a two-year hiatus spent caring for her children and dying mother, lamented, "The line is, 'Where are the women? There aren't enough women. How do we make it 50/50?' We're here." Indeed, women directors do exist—you just have to look for them. Dr. Stefania Benini, a professor in Italian at Temple University who specializes in Italian cinema, listed several candidates whose past projects align closely with the content of the Neapolitan novels and who, in her opinion, could've done a "wonderful job" with My Brilliant Friend: Antonietta De Lillo, Wilma Labate, Marina Spada, Alina Marazzi and Alice Rohrwacher. "Saverio Costanzo is a great director," says Dr. Benini, "But it would have been more sensitive toward the unique female perspective of the author to give the opportunity to a woman to do this series. It's a missed opportunity."

Still, I'm not just advocating for white Italian women directors (though for this particular project, a firm grasp of the Italian language is necessary). My Brilliant Friend isn't just an Italian story. Yes, the clashes between the country's political factions shape Lenù and Lila's lives, and the specter of the Naples neighborhood where they grew up haunts them long after they depart. But the underlying currents of the novels—sexism, the reversal and upheaval of gender roles, the desire to rail against the establishment and smash the status quo—are universal and can be applied to anyone who identifies as a woman.

If the television and film industries are intent on remaining relevant and successful, they must promote equality and create a precedent where directors are helming stories that match their main characters' points of view and life experiences. If we really are in a "golden age of television," and TV actually is the future of visual storytelling, the industry must do better. It cannot shut women out, or it runs the risk of history repeating itself.

And perhaps the adaptation of My Brilliant Friend won't even be good. Online chatter suggests fear that the complexity of Lenù's inner voice is something a camera cannot capture. The beauty of Ferrante's writing is she places her readers inside the uncensored mind of Lenù, until you feel as though you are her. HBO should give a woman a camera and a chance to do just that.

Julie KosinDirector of Audience Strategy & EntertainmentJulie Kosin is the director of audience strategy and entertainment at HarpersBAZAAR.com, where she runs the news team and oversees all things movies, TV, books, music, and art, from trawling Netflix for a worthy binge to endorsing your next book club pick.

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